Sweatshop Labor

A group of University
of California students say they won't wear university logo apparel made
in overseas sweatshops - and Tuesday they proved it.

...``The naked truth is that our Cal apparel is still made in sweatshops,
but we have the power to create an alternative model for the global
garment industry that rewards rather than punishes good factories,'' UC
Berkeley senior Nina Rizzo said in a statement.

So, they shift demand away from the "sweatshops." I guess if they think that the next-best job is better than a sweatshop job, so be it. One Farker had the following comment:

Somehow I'm thinking these same girls will also be the first to protest
the obnoxious increase in price once local union workers start making
the school sweatshirts.

Another wrote:

The people working
in them sure don't want them closed down. Better to work in a shop than
to be a prostitute on the street.

And from another:

When I was in college (UMass, so I knows me some protests), the issue
of sweatshops was raised in one of my American Foreign Policy classes.
It was really funny watching the patchouli-stank hippies going on and
on about the workers and such, when the professor stopped them, and
said, "you don't know what you are talking about." He then asked one of
his TAs, who was from Indonesia, to explain how the country's economy
would be destroyed if the factories left. She was fairly eloquent when
it came to the violent, bloody civil war that would erupt if the
companies left.

This last passage reminds me of a Chinese student I had in a class a couple of years back. She was an older student (not ancient, like me - just older than her classmates). Most of her classmates merely took notes in class and few really know what it feels like to live somewhere where there hasn't been much economic freedom. So, when I said things like "lowering the price of bread below the market clearing price will lower the direct price of bread, but will likely increase the overall sacrifices necessary to get bread," she vigorously nodded her head in agreement. Having lived through such things in China, she understood what happens when government officials actively control markets for "the good of society."